Mass shootings horrifying but statistically rare

By John Tedesco :
July 20, 2012
: Updated: July 20, 2012 10:46pm

Michael Rakauskas (left),16, and Victor Martinez,15, (right) wait for a friend in front of the Santikos Palladium Imax theater Friday July 20, 2012 before watching the new Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises." Rakauskas and Martinez, both students at TMI-The Episcopal School of Texas, said they had heard the news about the theater rampage in Aurora, Colorado but that it didn't deter them from wanting to see the movie. "I think it's just terrible, why would someone do that?", Rakauskas said.

Victor Martinez, 15, waits for a friend in front of the Santikos Palladium Imax theater Friday July 20, 2012 before watching the new Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises." Martinez, a student at TMI-The Episcopal School of Texas, said he and his friends had heard about the theater rampage in Aurora, Colorado, but that it didn't deter them from wanting to see the movie.

Shooting rampages at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Fort Hood have stunned Americans. Now, we have to endure a tragedy at yet another public venue that seemed safe: the movie theater.

Santikos Senior Manager Manny Pena said there will be “proper security” in the wake of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., that killed a dozen people. But he declined to say whether additional security was present because “you never know who's reading.”

Movie theaters in Denver announced they were beefing up security, and AMC Theatres there said it will ban masks and fake weapons.

Experts say the shooting massacre in Colorado is a tragic event — but it's also a freak occurrence. People are far more likely to be injured doing everyday things such as driving to the theater than actually being shot at the theater.

But that context is often lost in the saturated media coverage of shooting rampages.

“The big thing for me is, let's keep some things in perspective,” said Al Tompkins, who teaches ethics and journalism at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“The fact of the matter is, and it's always been true, there are going to be these kinds of lunatics that cause this kind of mayhem,” Tompkins said. But less than 1 percent of all homicides in the United States are mass shootings involving five or more victims.

“We're talking about really rare events,” said Glenn Muschert, a sociology professor at Miami University in Ohio, who has studied mass shootings at schools and the resulting media coverage.

Statistically, he said, an average school in America might experience a fatal shooting once every few hundred years. That's not only including rampages — that's any kind of fatal shooting.

“These events occupy a bigger portion of our perception of risk than they probably should,” he said.

Park Dietz, a Newport Beach, Calif., forensic psychiatrist who studied the perpetrators of mass shootings and criticized the media hype of their crimes, said the public's perception of risk often is skewed — especially if they're afraid of a horrifying event.

Twenty years ago, Dietz studied the attitudes of subway riders in New York and their fear of being pushed off a platform in front of a train.

Such events were rare — about once a year — and subway riders commuted safely to and from work in millions of trips. Yet, many riders told Dietz they were afraid of being pushed.

“This is statistically rare and should not be in the forefront of everyone's mind as they go about their day,” Dietz said of mass shootings. “But it's unavoidable.”